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DJB Releases All Source to Public Domain

Posted by Zonk on from the play-freebird dept.

A Sage Developer writes "During a recent conference, Sage Days 6, Dan Bernstein (who has recently come under attack for his licensing policy) was among the invited speakers. During a panel discussion on the future of open source mathematics software, Bernstein declared that all of his past and future code would be released to the public domain. This includes qmail, primegen, and a number of other projects. Given the headache that incompatibility between GPLv3 and GPLv2 is causing developers, will we see more of this?"

4 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Late to the party by Neo-Rio-101 · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    DJB is so late to this party. Releasing his code about 5 years ago would have been more useful to the rest of us. Myself, like many other people, threw the towel in on using his tools seriously a long time ago. At least endless qmail patching isn't needed anymore for those devoted to that MTA.

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    READY.
    PRINT ""+-0
  2. Re:In a word... by gmack · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Qmail hasn't been maintained in years and is essentially abandoned at this point. Public domain just makes that official so it's not as if the author needs to care what happens with the code.

    I'll be curious to see whether someone manages to rekindle interest in it. The news might be good for people stuck with a large qmail setup they can't change easily but I'm guessing most new projects would be on postfix.

  3. Re:In a word... by xhrit · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    So should governments have the freedom to take away human rights?

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    Dungeon Tactics : Free Open Source SRPG
  4. Re:In a word... by Sparr0 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I disagree. PD code can be "locked back up", making it only provisionally or temporarily free. It takes a license to make code truly and lastingly Free, which is an important distinction to most people around here.